Cristina Odone burst upon the British Catholic media scene last
spring when she became editor of The Catholic Herald at age 32.

In the United States, The Catholic Herald means the Milwaukee paper
whose hospitality I enjoyed last summer. Its British namesake has had
youngish editors before, and a young woman as well, but none has had
Odone's flair for arousing media interest. In six months she has
become the unofficial Catholic spokesperson on TV and radio.

It is not due just to her photogenic looks or her time spent in
public relations or her spell as a gossip columnist on The times in
London.

"No one," proclaimed the late Malcolm Muggeridge,
"can claim a profound knowledge of human nature and human vanity
without having worked on a gossip column." Those depths she
plumbed.

Nor is her fame due to the fact that she is Lorenzo's elder
sister. You've heard the name Odone. Joe Cunneen reviewed the
movie, "Lorenzo's Oil," glowingly in NCR, Feb 5. It is,
she told NCR, "100 percent faithful to what actually
happened."

For the record, Lorenzo was discovered to have ALP, a rare, killer
disease that is carried by women and suffered by boys. Her parents,
Augusto Odone, an Italian economist, and Michaela, his Irish-American
wife, defied the doctors and refused to believe that Lorenzo's case
was hopeless. He is still alive at age 14, and the family has not
despaired of a cure.

Cunneen complained that the movie concentrates on Lorenzo's
medical history and bypasses the religious theme that it constantly
suggested. Maybe that's discretion. There are some thoughts that
lie too deep for public tears.

Anyone who didn't know this background would certainly get
Odone wrong. She gives a convincing impersonation of a flibbertigibbet charmer for whom being a Catholic means fun and a certain social chic.
She makes religion not only fashionable, but even kinkily fashionable,
said one interviewer.

The women's pages have been filled with her folksy wisdom.
"Catholicism is like a bowl of spaghetti," she told one
astonished reporter, "full of different strands. It is only if you
eat them all together that it will do you any good." That sounds OK
and homely, but what on earth does it mean? Reported The Guardian:
"A bouncy Mediterranean Catholic, she has never quite gotten over
the English attitude to the faith: |When I was at Oxford, I bad my first
English boyfriend who was very cute and very rich. His mother told him
he must never marry me, or any Catholic for that matter, because 50
percent of his money would go to Rome. Poor boy, he believed her."

Reported The Independent: As a young woman, reconciling Catholicism
and her life-style were not easy, and at Oxford she stopped practicing.
|I became one of those random Massgoers. Guilt figured prominently in my
life.'" She quickly caught the Oxford habit of ironic
self-deprecation. She reminds me of a contempormy who quashed an
objector to the Index of Forbidden Books with the remark: "But
it's so handy for Catholics to have a selection of books to read on
a rainy afternoon."

But what was this Italo-Hibernian with an American accent doing at
Oxford anyway? Her father moved to Washington in 1970 to work for the
World Bank. She went to Marymount School, Washington, where "the
nuns still wore the full garb," and then to the interdenominational
National Cathedral High School. After that, she said, feeling the need
to "return to her European roots," she squeezed herself into
Oxford University by attending the "finishing school" of St.
Clare.

She then spent three emotionally exciting years at Worcester
College, majoring in French literature and history. By taking on The
Catholic Herald she was returning to her European roots a second time,
exchanging a plush office in Washington, where she advised European
firms on how to approach the World Bank, for the modest premises of the
London paper housed in a downtown 1901 school, close to the
dissenters' graveyard where Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan and William
Blake await the resurrection.

Why did she return to a paper on which she briefly worked in the
1980s? To say it was a challenge is to put it mildly. She once hurled a
typewriter at editor Peter Stanford when he wanted to publish a letter
from Victoria Gillick, a prominent right-winger, mother of 10,
describing her as "that silly young woman with the wrong attitude
to birth control."

Stanford resigned last year after publishing an outrageous book on
Catholics and sex. He sportingly proposed Odone as his successor. She
claims not to have read Stanford's book. Or rather, not to have
gotten beyond the first sentence, which she knows by heart: "Every
Catholic knows that they are just a screw away from perdition."

Odone proposes to "shake up" the paper and win it a new
audience among the "Catholic yuppies who are repentant of their
excesses of the '80s." She shares in their experience up to a
point: "They are married, they have the house, the car, the baby,
and now they are finding they need God."

In pompous language she would never, never use, Odone thinks she
has a mission, an apostolate among those "latent" Catholics
who dropped out in the 1980s.

The clergy, whom she describes as those lovely boys,"
don't know what to make of her. She attended their annual
conference and told them they had allowed the image of the church
"to dwindle into a B movie starring Bishop Eamonn Casey and
Victoria Gillick, based on a book by Evelyn Waugh, set in Castle Howard
with an interminable soundtrack of Ave Marias."

"Since they all want to be Jeremy Irons," she claims,
"they loved it."

That's the style, but where's the substance? Is there any
meat in this homecooked pasta? I cannot confidently answer those
questions, any more than I can assign her labels like
"liberal" or "conservative." She admits to having a
cousin in Opus Dei in Rome. But she is embarked on a different crusade.

The Vatican makes a great deal of fuss over the appointment of
bishops. Yet the appointment of the editor of a Catholic paper is
considerably more important. He/she addresses more Catholics more
regularly and more efficiently than any pastoral letter. But I
don't want to put ideas into anyone's head.

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